Pioneers and Padres:
Competing Mythologies in Northern
and Southern California, 1850–1930

Glen Gendzel

Like other white westerners, California migrants devised myths about their new homeland to foster a sense of regional identity. This article examines the origins of two separate and competing California mythologies: the Gold Rush Myth and the Spanish Myth. It suggests that conquest and colonization in the West entailed a process of myth-making that was hotly contested--but not always along racial lines.

Few students of the American West can resist the lure of legend. At some point in their careers, most leading western historians--old and new alike--have crossed the epistemological frontier between history-as-event and history-as-myth. Western myths command our attention because so many Americans believe in them, real or not. As historian Ann Fabian contends, "there is no 'real' history of the West, no history that can neatly excise its popular or legendary representations." Indeed, western mythology is one of the region's most distinctive attributes.1 Contrary to historiographical convention, however, the West was not entirely a "narrative colony" of the East, "a projecting place for the mythic needs of others"; indigenous peoples raised plenty of home-grown myths out West, and migrants to the region lost no time in planting their own.2 New arrivals invented founding myths for their communities in order to endow wandering, polyglot populations with unity, stability, and identity. These regional myths helped western migrants fasten themselves to the soil and to each other, bestowing a fictive sense of unity and permanence onto fragile outposts in contested terrain.

1

Western myth, then, was two-dimensional, composed of both "national imaginings" and "local imaginings," as historian Richard White suggests. Similarly, historian David Wrobel separates the West's "exterior regionalism," the Cowboy-and-Indian imagery of popular culture, from its "interior regionalism," the myths of western origin that helped new residents form imagined communities. As Euro-Americans moved west, they invented traditions that justified conquest and displacement of prior occupants. White migrants invariably "find a way of claiming a pedigree, a line of descent, a status of legitimacy" in the West, historian Patricia Nelson Limerick observes. "In a society that rested on a foundation of invasion and conquest," she writes, "the matter of legitimacy was up for grabs."3 Typically, white westerners and their descendants told stories about the courage and sacrifice of "pioneers" who triumphed over man, beast, and nature. Each new community revered the memory of heroic trail-blazers, sodbusters, town-founders, and Indian- or Mexican-slayers. Western pioneer-worship literature blossomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as raw frontier settlements groped for the stability of tradition through acts of filiopiety. People fresh off a Pullman car fancied themselves "branches and twigs . . . sprung from the pioneer root," in Wallace Stegner's phrase. White westerners created pioneer societies, collected pioneer lore, marked pioneer sites, observed pioneer anniversaries, and reenacted pioneer exploits, proudly calling themselves "The Children of Pioneers."4

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